Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Department of Spurious Statistics and Silly Diagrams

It purports to show the “spread of Capitalism” as “influenced by the
writings of Adam Smith” devised by some “smart folks at Harvard’s
metalab”.Readers are invited to “Watch a Planet slowly grasped by the invisible
hand.”

“This animated infographic
shows where, when, and in what language Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations has been published around the world. Watch a
planet slowly grasped by the invisible hand.

Below the map, you
can see the distribution of different languages the book has appeared in. What
really shines is how all the pieces of information interact with and relate to
each other--there’s a harmony to this visual matrix, so no statistic is
presented absent its connection to other data.

It’s
an elegant way to depict the diffusion of an idea over time, though, because
the graphic stops in 2000, it’s certainly worth asking how the last decade or
so would alter the map. And of course the spatial distribution of editions
inevitably inspires questions of why the book has so little penetration in
Africa: Is that a function of lack of publishers, or a lack of excitement for
Smith’s ideas. But, as the creator notes: "This map is only a cryptic
narrative about the dissemination of ideas, and as such, I hope it will inspire
economic historians towards new and interesting projects surrounding Smith and
his legacy."

Comment

The
infographic is spurious on two main counts.

First,
Adam Smith (1723-90) did not ‘invent’ or proselytise or have anything to do
with the claimed dependency of the spread of “capitalism” – a word not invented
in English until 1854 (Oxford English Dictionary); he wrote about “commercial
society”, what he called the “fourth age of man”, which had existed with
interruptions since the first towns were founded in association with the “Age
of Farming”, that is several millennia earlier.

Secondly,
human societies and their economic nature emerged and evolved independent of
any philosophers or book authors.Those of an
Hayekian mindset refer to this process as “spontaneous”, a word I am not too
satisfied with because it raises questions of why an event spontaneously
appears in some part of the Earth but not in others and in a time span not identical
elsewhere to those elsewhere. It could be someone stumbles on some new arrangements that have unforeseen consequences only evident years, centuries or millennia later, and then slowly spread.

Capitalism
and the markets that preceded its various forms were certainly not “invented” nor were they “designed” by anybody; its form was influenced by past events certainly, as
those past events were influenced by even earlier events.

Even
humans did not appear “spontaneously”; the species that became them, after the
speciation from from the common ancestor of Chimpanzee Apes and proto-prehumans about 6 million years ago, which survive today, appeared via various histories of pre-human species, some of which entered
separate evolutionary chains and over several millions of years declined and
disappeared.The modern human species is
about 200,000 years old. In the early decades the human species could have been wiped out by a disease, a natural event, or a wrong "stumble".

Hence,
the notion that Adam Smith “caused” capitalism in as absurd as it is
ridiculous; its like saying that Isaac Newton “invented” gravity. It follows
that Wealth Of Nations did not, never did, and for all time never will be
responsible in any way for the forms that what we call capitalism has taken or
takes in future.The “infograph” is
spurious.

If
Adam Smith had never lived – he was a “sickly child”, nursed and indulged by
his loving mother - commercial society would have evolved much as it did after he died.Smith’s influence was profound in
an intellectual sense – he helped explain how commerce evolved, and how
governments evolved too from absolutist tyranny towards imperfect liberty. (democracy was not yet agenda; an attempt to force is progress ended in Napoleonic tyranny)On some levels his ideas were
accepted and influenced attitudes and, occasionally, public policy, though much
of what he wrote about was ignored.Worse, much of what he did not write about, but which is falsely
credited to him (laissez-faire, invisible hands, selectively limited
government) became influential among folk misusing his name – that dreaded trivia of Western
“celebrity” science – and misguides public policy and the personal beliefs of
people who ought to know better, as Lost Legacy tries to point out.

Smith
was a pragmatist not an ideologue.As a moral philosopher, he did not do anything, but observed
everything.He was a scientist,
not an evangelist.He analysed his
society as he saw it and as he had learned about its history. We can learn from his Works and better understand what is happening, but whether more people will listen is another matter.